"I Wouldn't Really Call it an RPG..."

Okay, here's the deal. I'm not an old fan retuning to Diablo 3 from the old Diablo games, so there is really no way for me to be biased about my score. I've played Diablo 2, but only for a couple days to get ready for the release of Diablo 3. In my personal opinion, Diablo 2 was a surprisingly enjoyable game for being played in early 2012. It was also a good template to base my review off of for Diablo 3, but like I said: I am not going to be biased with my scoring because if I were this game would be getting a lower score than I'm going to give it. Alright. Lets get on with the review shall we?

Graphics: 8/10

Being the most notable change from Diablo 2 to Diablo 3 is the new graphic style that Blizzard used. It's hard not to enjoy the cell shaded cartoony look that it has, but it's really a lot less dark than the second one was. Another thing you may notice upon character creation is the rather low textures and polygon count on the games meshes, although I suppose this really doesn't matter on a game where the camera is positioned twenty feat above the world. I still I think Blizzard could have done a little better on this one, but you would be hard pressed to try and claim that Diablo 3 is not an attractive looking game.

Sound: 7/10

The sounds of Diablo 3 are of good quality, and sound effects have a nice ring to them such as when you pick up gold, potions, weapons etc. Fighting noises including swinging swords, blowing up bad guys, guts flying everywhere, and squishing small creatures are all on par with the games atmosphere. The voice acting is also very well done, but some of the companions in your game start getting annoying after a little bit because they start to repeat old conversations after the game runs out of dialog for them. The only thing that wasn't my favorite was the background music. You might notice some familiar melodies from old Diablo games and it's honestly not a bad soundtrack, but I couldn't help wondering what happened to the cool guitar soundtrack from the first part of Diablo 2.

Gameplay: 5/10

First things first. My original biased score was 3/10, but I thought that was a little harsh so I re-evaluated it. I'm not going to lie, Diablo 3's combat system is very, very addictive. The hack and slash of the combat system is undeniably enjoyable. It's very satisfying when you or you and a group of friends beat down a big tough boss and his small army of minions. Ironically, the fact that the game was so good at that part made all the flaws of the rest of the game that much more obvious. Why? Because Blizzard thought that it would be a good idea to remove all the RPG element of the game, which is literally the second half of the fun in any RPG game. No more skill trees. No more thinking ahead with your character. No more character builds. You might say, But yes uhuh it's an RPG game because you have stats and you level up and uhuh. but my hangup is that they took out character build and personalization. What's the point of leveling up if you just unlock every skill in the game eventually over time? You don't actually build a character as you play, you just level up and get better gear. That's it. There's no point in playing two Monks because they would both be the same exact character by the time I got to the level cap. This is not me being mad that Blizzard changed the formula of Diablo, this is me being confused as to how you can even call it an RPG game and not just a hack and slash. Blizzard's choice to remove skill trees was a poor one. Why did they do it? Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they were in a hurry to release the game. Who knows. All I know is that this game might have been one of the very best games I've played in years if they hadn't cut that part out. To me, that is very disappointing.

Story: 7/10

As far as the story for Diablo 3 goes, it's nothing special, but it's not bad either. If you stopped to watch the little cut scenes here and there, you can tell that at least a little effort was made to make it somewhat interesting, but mostly I found myself skipping them after a while. This will be a part of that game you'll either like or just not care about.

Service: 2/10

I'm not sure what category to put this one in, so I'm going to give it it's very own. This is truly the worst part of the whole game. Despite the obvious lack of competence from developers on launch day, there are still people out there who will devoutly defend Blizzard no matter what. To me, it's pretty embarrassing that a company that owns the biggest MMORPG on the planet somehow managed to let there server's crash... on launch day! And why is this a problem in the first place? What happened to people OWNING there games they payed sixty dollars for? Why do I have to log in to play? Can I not be trusted to play my own game by myself OFFLINE without Blizzard keeping an eye on me? It's sad to see where the gaming industry is going these days. In my eyes, money has clearly become more important than the consumer. And with the new auction house's spend real life cash, get loot, Blizzard get's money system was obviously the main goal with this one. It's always sad to see a great series become a cash cow, but what can you do?

So overall Diablo 3 wasn't a bad game, and I'm definitely going to finish it, but the odds of me playing it much more after that are fairly low. People can defend Blizzard as much as they want to, but I believe if a company as big as Blizzard really wanted to, they could have made this the very best Diablo game yet.